July 31, 2010
It might be obvious that I haven’t made any progress since my last entry. The problem has been that my attention is scattered. I do not think this is necessarily a bad thing, in that I have not really been idle, but have made progress (however limited) on many projects—no less than seven in total.
I think I made the most textual progress on Death and Life and Samantha, which I have discussed in this journal. But I also made some progress with a stage play titled (for now), “What do you want?” In fact, at my wife’s advising, I took a single scene out of that play and tried to strengthen it as a stand-alone ten-minute play, which is easier to get produced, and for which format there are numerous contests.
Additionally, I did some planning and a little bit of writing on a few other novels: The Death of Aaron Jamison, which is an expansion of a short story I wrote in 1998, itself only a sketch of an intended longer work; The Assassination of Prince Rolin en Qarriel, which was intended to be a light and easy work just to give me a bit of freedom—I started writing it because I was annoyed with my more “literary” ambitions and decided to write something purely plot-driven, based on all the tired tropes of pop literature—and instead, it has turned into an attempt at writing a Greek-styled tragedy.
Between the Stars I worked on just a little bit, but the story hasn’t come together for me quite yet. But also this summer an old story I’ve been thinking about for several years got a new bit of inspiration—working title, Immortality—and I wrote just a little bit of that and have a rough framework developed. A new story occurred to me, about a serial killer, but it needs something more, a second piece that eludes me. I sketched a bit of it and wrote a bare introductory chapter, but got no further.
And last, I did quite a bit of work on an essay titled “A Philosophy for Writing Fiction,” which was a response to my experiences on the website “Authonomy.” I will probably continue to touch up that essay for the next few years, and at some point I will post it on my website.
In the meantime, I am about to start grad school. So my current project is now Graduate School, and it is also my primary focus. I do not expect to write very much fiction while I am enrolled. I want to give school as much focus as I can, and to that end, I will not work on fiction with any regularity. Obviously inspiration in such a fecund environment as academia will be ongoing, and once in a while I will probably touch a project or two. I will update this space.